Aschenbach had once stated outright, in an inconspicuous passage, that nearly every great thing that exists exists “in despite,” and was brought to completion despite distress and torment, poverty, abandonment, physical weakness, vice, passion and a thousand obstructions. But that was more than an observation, it was a record of experience; indeed, it was the formula for his life and fame, the key to his oeuvre; and so is it any wonder that it also informed the moral nature and the external behavior of his most characteristic protagonists?
